Archive for March, 2013

My title may have led you to think I was going to argue for or against Rubenesque body types, or discuss a fitness insight from my work for HumanaNatura. But I actually want to share a strategy insight and talk about the curves of our lives and groups, rather than those of our limbs and torsos.

Though few of us have considered the idea that our lives and social settings can have a distinct underlying curve or shape, these natural patterns do indeed exist and are discoverable by us. What we might call our life-curves are real and tangible reflections of the way we live and, in particular, how we pattern our actions against our progressive potential. In theory and practice, life-curves prove quite powerful, in the results they create for us, and as a tool of personal and group strategy and aid to higher quality of life and functioning.

The Core Idea

The core idea of natural curves is that elemental patterns can be shown to underlie all of our lives, even as these patterns remain hidden to us. In essence, our personal life-curve is the overall direction that our life or life trajectory takes over time – again, against our progressive or developmental potential. In practice, understanding and seeing our life-curves is a lot like learning about climate. Like the larger conditions that span and influence the weather we encounter each day. life-curves are subtle but ever-present shapes behind the scenes, but ones that are equally accessible and even equally obvious once grasped.

As a model of a critical dynamic underlying our lives – essentially our degree of natural progressivity or tendency to increase the quality of our functioning or health – life-curves describe organic forces or patterns that reflect and ultimately govern our lives in important ways. Because of this, probing these background patterns proves essential to the work of progressive modern living. And, as you will see, life-curves are shapes that reflect processes we can each sense, assess, and ultimately alter ourselves.

To introduce this insight-rich, immediately actionable, and potentially life-changing concept, I’d like to talk about three life-curves in particular. I would also like to again underscore that this simple but powerful model of life applies to groups too. Just as with individual people, organizations and communities, and even whole societies, can be seen as having a distinct and dominating curve or trajectory – one that expresses and predicts its underlying health and progressive potential.

As background, I should add that the idea our lives and the world around us have a tangible and health-impacting shape comes from my workshops and will be discussed in my first full-length book, due out in the second half of the year. As you will see, each of the three curves I will introduce implies a very different mode of modern living or collective functioning.

Greetings from HumanaNatura at the equinox! In the natural year, we are now halfway between the extremes of light and darkness of the summer and winter solstices. Everywhere on earth, there is equal day and night, and a heightened balance or centering that touches many aspects of life.

In the HumanaNatura natural health system, we encourage practitioners to use the twice-yearly opportunity and special character of each equinox to seek new attentiveness and self-awareness. The equinox is a time that is naturally conducive to reflection and planning, and we advocate both activities now to mark and make use of this equinox.

For people using our natural health system, HumanaNatura recommends the crucial practice of reviewing and updating our Natural Life Plan at this and every equinox – making changes as needed, and renewing and revitalizing our commitment to progressive natural life and health for the months ahead.

If you have not yet created a Natural Life Plan – guiding your use and expression of the third HumanaNatura technique of Natural Living – this link and one to our planning worksheets will get you started on our seven-step life planning process. We hope these important HumanaNatura resources will help you to begin more intentional living, and naturally progressive and health-seeking life, in the days and weeks ahead.

Our newest community newsletter was released today, which is published eight times yearly in harmony with key milestones of the natural year. To receive future HumanaNatura member newsletters or learn about the important benefits of membership in our global practitioner-advocate network, go to Join HumanaNatura.

In the meantime, however you mark this equinox, we wish you natural balance and new natural health and happiness!

We’d like to answer briefly but definitively the question of whether green diets are better than red ones, and also explain which forms of modern eating are likely best overall and why. To do this, we’ll first define our terms and then consider the overall health implications of four potential daily diets on the “red-green” continuum.

HumanaNatura’s OurPlate Model In Practice

When we talk about green diets, we of course mean ones dominated by plant foods, whether measured by both food volume or total calories. Green diets typically will have at least 65% of calories from vegetable sources, and often very high amounts of raw vegetables and fruits in particular.

Green eating includes not just vegetarian and vegan diets, but also other vegetable and fruit-rich forms of eating – such as the Mediterranean diet and HumanaNatura’s OurPlate healthy natural eating model.

Red diets, by contrast, are ones where food volume and calories are dominated by animal foods, and where animal proteins and fats will generally account for more than 50% of total calories. Red-based eating includes diets rich in fatty red meats and eggs, but also ones with high amounts of lean meats, poultry, and fish.

In defining and contrasting these two general and common modes of modern eating, we would also like to introduce the idea of beige diets. By beige diets, we mean eating patterns high in carbohydrate and/or fat-rich industrial and agricultural foods – foods other than those in our primary natural diet of unprocessed meats, raw vegetables, and fruit. Modern calorie-dense beige foods typically displace or augment natural meat, raw vegetable, and fruit consumption and frequently result in greatly elevated daily calorie levels.

On this point, we would add that when beige eating is blended with a green or red dietary pattern – as is common today – we get the variants of grain and bean dominated beige-green diets and fast food oriented beige-red diets (think soyburgers or hamburgers eaten with sugary sodas and sweet dessert foods).